How PostboxMap differs from Dracos (Find Your Nearest Postbox)

People searching for a UK postbox map often come across more than one site. Find Your Nearest Postbox on Dracos and PostboxMap.co.uk solve related but different problems. This page explains how they differ so you can pick the right tool, or use both.

According to the project's own about page, the Dracos finder grew out of Royal Mail data released through Freedom of Information requests (including coordinates and last collection times), early crowd-sourcing to place boxes from textual descriptions, and ongoing updates from OpenStreetMap. If a location or collection time is wrong, the maintainer asks people to fix it on OpenStreetMap so everyone benefits. The site does not automatically remove postboxes that have gone; you can contact the maintainer if a box should be removed.

In short: Dracos focuses on practical "where is my nearest postbox?" use, grounded in Royal Mail-derived data and OSM.

PostboxMap is a contributor-led, moderated map aimed at postbox spotters, historians, and anyone who wants a structured public record. Registered users submit new postboxes or corrections; moderators review them before they go live. Each record can include photos, reign (royal cypher), form (pillar, wall, lamp, and so on), variants, manufacturer, and notes. You can explore via the map, nearest postbox by postcode, browse by reign, form, or town, and search. There is a public API with keys, scoring and a leaderboard for contributors, and identification content such as the identification guide and guide to UK postboxes.

Use Dracos if your priority is nearest-postbox lookup in a tool built from Royal Mail data and OpenStreetMap, including last collection times, and you are happy to correct upstream data on OSM where that applies.

Use PostboxMap if you want to browse or document heritage detail (cyphers, types, photos), submit or correct records through PostboxMap's own moderation flow, use the API programmatically, or take part in the contributor community.

The two sites are complementary, not rivals. Many people use a nearest-postbox finder for posting a letter and use PostboxMap to log rare boxes, compare cyphers, or plan a spotting route. If you improve a location on OpenStreetMap, that can flow through to Dracos's model; PostboxMap still keeps its own moderated dataset for the fields and photos it stores.

On PostboxMap, use the correction workflow on each postbox page (see Correction process). That updates PostboxMap after moderator review. It does not replace OSM edits for tools that read from OSM; for Dracos-related location or collection time issues, follow the guidance on their about page.